Gore Verbinski interview: A Cure for Wellness and the sickness of modern man

When the movie begins, Lockhart is sent to a remote Alpine medical spa to retrieve his company’s CEO, Pembroke, who left New York after a mental breakdown. Now, instead of crunching numbers 14 hours a day, his daily routine is filled with massages, hot baths, and trips to the sauna. It almost seems like paradise.

Which is why Pembroke doesn’t want to leave. In fact, we find out nobody ever leaves. But is that because the sanitarium is a nice place to be or are the patients not improving? Carefully, masterfully, what Verbinski initially presents to be a serene and tranquil place suddenly takes on a very sinister veneer.

“The movie is really about two worlds,” Verbinski said. “As Lockhart arrives at this place, he’s entering more of a dream logic. He’s leaving the waking state. We tried to create the sense that the narrative itself was that black spot on your X-ray, or that invisible force. Things can remain enigmatic because you sense there’s some other force, something inevitable happening,” Verbinski said. “To me, that’s the big tease—to try to make everything feel like there’s this sickness that’s not going away.”

As the movie unfolds, the audience experiences Lockhart’s mounting anxiety, which verges on madness the longer he stays at the sanitarium. When he eventually becomes a patient at the medical spa, the audience is right along for the ride as he endures Dr. Volmer’s terrifying treatments, which includes sensory deprivation and a very unfortunate encounter with eels.

“As a society, things are becoming increasingly irrational,” Verbinski said. “I think we know that and there’s a sense of denial. We’re preying upon a very contemporary fear.”

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/02/15/a-cure-for-wellness-gore-verbinski-interview/